Blackboard Course Shells - Now Available for Fall!

We are happy to communicate that Fall course shells have now been successfully loaded in Blackboard and have been associated with their instructors. Professors should be able to access them now by logging in to Blackboard via Artemis.

Be aware that students will not yet be populated within courses, and thus will not have access to them, even if the instructor makes the course shell available. The loading of students into courses will take place during the course of the week of August 20.

FSCJ Online Courses

Those that use a course master may not yet have the associated content loaded into the shell. At this point, all A term master course content should be loaded into the Blackboard shells. The work of loading B term course content should be completed this week.

Issues, Questions, or Concerns?

If for any reason you have issues with access to Blackboard or are unable to view a course that you have been assigned for the Fall, please contact EdTech@fscj.edu.

FAQs

I was recently encoded in a course, however, the shells have not appeared within Blackboard. When will they appear?

Any courses that were encoded within the last week or so will not be available in Blackboard until the final migration is complete and all data has been transitioned over. We appreciate the patience of all instructors who were recently added.

My course and lab appear as two separate shells.

Many courses with a hands-on facet are experiencing this issue--not exclusive to pure sciences--as a result of the way that these courses are encoded in PeopleSoft. When a student enrolls in the lecture component, they are automatically enrolled in the lab. However, these courses are still graded as one course offering.

In order to reduce confusion for both faculty and students when navigating Blackboard, we would like to ask all faculty with duplicate course shells to ONLY make the lecture component available to students and keep all other components unavailable. To identify which Blackboard shell was created for the lecture component, look at your course schedule within myFSCJ. As shown in the example below, “lecture” or “laboratory” is marked in parentheses after the course title. In the first column, note that the course code is the same, but the reference number in parentheses is different for the lecture (3888) and the laboratory (3889).

When looking at courses within myBlackboard, the last four numbers in each course shell title matches reference number seen in the first column of the faculty schedule in myFSCJ. Thus, in the provided example below, the second course, COOP-EDCTN (INTERN)-3889, is the laboratory component and should not be made available to students.

Students do not see courses that are not made available in myBlackboard and therefore will not be aware of the duplicate course shells. Please know that this process will not have any effect on students’ final grades.

Will the class roster populate students info at a later time?

Yes. The creation of course shells and instructor association was the first step of the integration of PeopleSoft with Blackboard. After receiving feedback from professors, we prioritized the creation of course shells so that content could be built in advance of the Fall Semester. The addition of students to Blackboard requires a change to student user IDs that cannot be performed until the Summer Semester's end, so as not to disrupt ongoing classes. We’ll be sending more information out about the progress soon.

The IT Maintenance Dates are not currently visible within the Syllabus Builder, however often used to inform students and for planning purposes.

We are currently working to integrate the dates within the online syllabus builder, however they may not be ready prior to Fall. You can visit the Calendar page located within fscj.edu to view a full Collegewide calendar.